Network segmentation is an effective strategy for protecting access to key data assets, and impeding the lateral movement of threats and cyber criminals inside your data center. With network virtualization, such as VMware NSX, now a reality it's now far easier and quicker to set up granular security policies for east-west traffic within the data center. Yet the added granularity of securities policies creates significant complexity. Presented by renowned industry expert Professor Avishai Wool, this technical webinar will provide strategies and best practices to help organizations migrate and manage security policies efficiently within a micro-segmented data center. During the webinar Professor Wool will cover how to: · Identify and securely migrate legacy applications to a micro-segmented data center · Effectively define and enforce security policies for East-West traffic · Manage the micro-segmented data center alongside traditional on-premise security devices ·Identify risk and manage compliance in a micro-segmented data center · Use network segmentation to reduce the scope of regulatory audits · Identify and avoid common network segmentation mistakes

1. HOW TO MIGRATE AND
MANAGE SECURITY POLICIES
IN A SEGMENTED DATA
CENTER

2. • Migrate applications to a micro-segmented data center
• Define and enforce security policies for East-West traffic
• Manage micro-segmented data center alongside traditional
devices
• Identify risk and manage compliance
TOPICS COVERED

3. THE BASICS

4. LEGACY DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE
Users Servers
Outside World,
Business partners,
Perimeter
Firewall
East-West traffic North-South traffic
4

5. WHY THIS IS RISKY
• No filtering capabilities controlling east-west traffic
• Allows unrestricted traffic:
• Between internal users’ desktops/laptops and servers
• Between servers in different segments
• Once attackers gain a foothold – free lateral movement
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6. SEGMENTED DATA CENTER ARCHITECTURE
Users
Zone
Server
Zone 2 Outside World,
Business partners,
Perimeter
FirewallServer
Zone 1
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7. SEGMENTED = MORE SECURE
• Introduce filtering choke-points between zones
• Allows control of east-west traffic
• Lets organizations restrict lateral movement between zones
• How can we make this a reality?
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8. POLL
Which platform do you use to manage your private cloud / virtualized
data center?
• VMware
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• OpenStack
• We don't have a virtualized data center

9. SEGMENTATION CHALLENGES

10. CHALLENGE #1: INTRODUCING CHOKE POINTS
• In traditional data center: a major effort
• Hardware, cabling, reconfigure switching and routing
• In a virtualized, software-defined, data center:
• Built-in firewalls as part of the infrastructure
• No extra hardware needed
• Software-Defined Networking 
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11. CHALLENGE #2: ZONING
• How many zones to define?
• Which subnets should reside in each zone?
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12. A ZONING TRADE-OFF
• Traffic inside each zone remains unrestricted
• For better security, define many small zones
• “Micro-segmentation”
• But: need policy (rules) between every pair of zones
• “Allow service X from zone 1 to zone 2”
• N zones ==> N*N traffic directions
• For better manageability, define a few large zones
12

13. CHALLENGE #3: FILTERING POLICY BETWEEN ZONES
• Traffic inside each zone is unfiltered: allowed
• … traffic between zones must be explicitly allowed by policy
• Goal: write policy to allow legitimate zone-crossing traffic
• Challenge: discover and characterize this traffic
• Did you know: VMware NSX’s default policy is “allow all”
• Works around the challenge
• … But is completely insecure

13

14. APPLICATION-AWARE SEGMENTATION

15. THE BUSINESS-APPLICATION PERSPECTIVE
• East-West traffic is generated by business applications
• Each business application has:
• Servers supporting it
• Clients accessing it
• Business application connectivity requirements:
• Server-to-server traffic flows
• Client-to-server traffic flows
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16. SEGMENTATION FOR BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
• Human-accessible systems: in a separate zone from servers:
• Desktops / Laptops / Smartphones
• Servers of an application, that communicate with each other:
• in same zone
• Infrastructure servers, that support multiple applications:
• in a dedicated zone
16

17. PLANNING NETWORK SEGMENTATION: BLUEPRINT
• Discover business applications’ connectivity requirements
• Select number of zones, and their characterization
• Based on applications’ flows, assign subnets to zones
• Write filtering policy (rules) allowing zone-crossing flows
• Avoid breaking business applications’ connectivity
17

18. DISCOVERY

19. IS YOUR ORGANIZATION WELL-DISCIPLINED?
If:
• All applications are documented
• Applications’ connectivity requirements are documented
• Documentation is machine readable
Then “discovery” is easy!
• What if documentation is missing / outdated ?



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20. DISCOVERY FROM TRAFFIC
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21. DISCOVERY RESULTS: ANALYTICS ON SNIFFED TRAFFIC
21
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22. ZONE-CROSSING TRAFFIC: HIGH LEVEL POLICY

23. DOCUMENT: THE CONNECTIVITY MATRIX
Allowed traffic between every pair of zones
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24. ZOOM IN: FROM/TO THE PEER DMZ
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25. DEMONSTRATION OF MICRO-SEGMENTATION
WITH THE ALGOSEC SUITE

26. IMPORT INTO BUSINESSFLOW
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27. 27
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28. 28
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29. 29

30. 30

31. 31

32. VISIBILITY

33. 33

34. 34

35. Enforcing Micro Segmentation
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37. Confidential 37

38. MAINTENANCE OF THE SEGMENTATION

39. MAINTENANCE OF THE SEGMENTATION
• Zoning remains stable over time
• … but application connectivity requirements evolve
• … so filtering policies need to change over time
• Need application-aware and segmentation-aware change
management process
• Need visibility that filtering policies comply with zoning
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41. CONNECTIVITY SPREADSHEET
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42. 42
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43. SEGMENTATION-AWARE CHANGE PROCESS

44. NORTH-SOUTH TRAFFIC
• Hybrid network:
• Software-defined data center
• traditional networking outside data center
• Application connectivity is also north-south
• Goal: Single change workflow for all filtering technologies
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45. • Identical for North-South and East-West
• Indifferent to network technology
• Abstracts away filtering device details
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46. • Outside data center (traditional)
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47. • Inside data center (virtualized)
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48. 48

49. • AlgoSec Standard risks +
• User-defined risks +
• Connectivity spreadsheet violations
• What-if risk check, before changes
are implemented
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50. POLL
What are your plans for filtering East-West traffic?
• Already implemented
• Planning to implement over the next 6 months
• Planning to implement over the next 6-12 months
• No plans

51. SUMMARY
Plan
• Discover business applications’ connectivity requirements
• Design zoning, write policy for zone-crossing flows
• Document in connectivity matrix
Maintain
• Visibility, automated comparison to connectivity matrix
• Segmentation-aware change process
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52. MORE RESOURCES
52
Meet us at VMworld – booth 658 !

53. THANK YOU